


The Summit of Peor

by judgehangman



Series: The Bloodhound Chronicles [1]
Category: Makai Ouji: Devils and Realist
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Apocalypse, Blood and Injury, Character Study, Gen, M/M, Post-Canon, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-25 10:35:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18259535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/judgehangman/pseuds/judgehangman
Summary: "They reach the edge of this world the day the veil is broken."The end of the world gets to Limbo first. Gilgamesh and Dantalion walk.





	The Summit of Peor

Limbo, Gilgamesh first learned years ago, is a typical mythological crossroad, a space of transience between worlds entirely betwixt and between. It’s the perfect solution to the issue of enmity and the perfect protection to all that come to Sleep here. Those in Limbo cannot be hurt because, in that nonplace, they don’t truly exist. In practice, however, millennia of illusion magic have made it appear somewhat akin to a hotel, if the rooms in a hotel were infinite _loci amoenis_ : an endless labyrinth of doors preceded by a large Antechamber, in which an innkeeper helps each person check in.

He never bothered with the idea of leaving that central establishment, and never even knew it was possible until Uriel first dropped them off at the Antechamber and then next morning he had to wordlessly follow Dantalion out the front door and into a city square.

They take the main road and walk south towards the mountains, for miles upon miles with the twin suns above their heads, the cold wind biting at their skin. The silence between them stretches out, no words meaningful enough to fill it. Gilgamesh takes to engraving words into trees and rocks and the muddied pelts of deer carcasses. Dantalion collects bones from small animals half-buried in the snow.

Winter in Limbo smells of wood ash and fire.

A thick mist settles around them as the suns begin to set. The road comes to a halt at a creek; the trees are close together here, coated white like the ground, the black eyes in their trunks peering out from behind the snow. Dantalion stops, so suddenly it makes Gilgamesh almost collide with him, and turns around.

“Why are you still following me?”

Gilgamesh finds the answer comes easier than he thought it would.

“My body and soul belong to you. I made you a promise, and so I will follow.”

“You don’t have to.” Dantalion looks _through_ him. “We both know that the deal is arguable at best.”

He shrugs.

“Even so.”

Dantalion nods, resigned, and they follow the course of the river.

That night, they set up camp at the nearest clearing and they don’t sleep. The mountains sing a song of war. Dantalion carves a flute out of driftwood. Gilgamesh watches from where he sits languidly atop a large rock. There’s a wolf howling in the woods.

When the morning comes, they keep walking.

The suns are high in the sky when they reach the front gates of the estate. Gilgamesh wants to remark on how wholly uncreative it is that Dantalion’s safe space is an exact replica of his manor in Hell, but he thinks back to his own room — the walled city of Uruk, white mayflowers in the Euphrates — and whatever it is that he meant to say dies in his throat.

There are no servants waiting for them inside, but the lights are on. Dantalion stops at the doorway, his jaw clenched, and lets out a sharp breath. The sadness in his eyes is one that Gilgamesh knows intimately but has no words to describe. He presses his hand to the small of Dantalion’s back, but Dantalion closes in on himself, his shoulders tense, and shrugs him off to finally step inside.

That night, Gilgamesh dreams of iris flowers and Enkidu’s sharp smile.

* * *

One morning, he finds Dantalion pacing.

“I’m going to find Astaroth.”

Gilgamesh nods, and the conversation ends there.

For some reason, Dantalion doesn't go.

* * *

It doesn’t take long for him to realize that the Antechamber has no real exits and all of this is just in Dantalion’s room. He had his suspicions when he noticed how the world seems to flicker at the edges and how Dantalion is always sure of where to go, but what truly gives it away is when that ornate golden door starts showing itself to him, demanding him to go away. He ignores it so pointedly even the room itself gives up trying to tell him he isn’t welcome.

They don’t talk much.

It’s not that there isn’t anything to say. There are so many things to say that Gilgamesh thinks he’ll never have any of the proper words to convey them. But Dantalion makes it clear that he doesn’t want to talk, that he couldn’t care less about any of the hundreds of saccharine excuses ready to drip out of Gilgamesh’s lips at a moment’s notice. So Gilgamesh says nothing, and Dantalion says nothing, and they settle into a silence that isn’t comfortable as much as it just _is._

One night, he’s sitting on the front steps of the manor. The wine he drinks is sweet and fills him with pleasant warmth, but imaginary alcohol can’t fill the void in his chest with feeling. He drinks it anyway. In his room, he would’ve been having loud parties to his heart’s content, trapped in that magic-induced stupor, as he always did whenever he was in Limbo. Here, though, everything is too quiet. The apathy is almost unbearable.

Dantalion approaches slowly.

“Gilgamesh.” He says. “Why are you truly here?”

And that’s an answer he doesn’t have, because he doesn’t know it himself. Why is he here, bored out of his mind, and not where he should be? Why is he following Dantalion around like a dog, waiting for Dantalion to throw him a bone?

“You nearly died.” He stares at the wine bottle as it dissipates into the mist. “Would you believe me if I told you I’m worried about leaving you alone? Because you shouldn’t be.”

Dantalion sits down next to him. It’s clear that the answer doesn’t satisfy him.

“We aren’t friends.”

And that’s true, in a sense. They _were_ friends, and then they weren’t, and that’s all there is to it. This mockery of an alliance they have now is nothing if not a power-hungry opportunistic lie.

“We were once. Maybe a long time ago, but that doesn’t change the fact that I still care about you.”

“Maybe so.” Dantalion gives him a look. “But you don’t get to pretend you weren’t the one who walked away.”

The gas light on the porch flickers.

Gilgamesh stays quiet.

* * *

He watches Dantalion pick seashells by the edge of the water.

They don’t talk.

Flowers don’t bloom here.

In the distance, a wolf howls.

* * *

The weeks melt into each other as winter thaws away.

Dantalion warms with the weather. His eyes are still untrusting — as they should be — but there isn’t much of an open disdain towards Gilgamesh as there was during the winter. The silence is more comfortable now, and even the excruciating nothingness in Gilgamesh’s chest gives place to a dull sense of ease.

It feels almost like how it used to be between them.

The bitterness in that thought catches him off-guard.

* * *

The apathy reaches him again the day the flowers begin to bloom. He wants to do something, preferably something that will _hurt_ , like breaking a bone or the hastily stitched-together pieces of their friendship, but settles for sparring with Dantalion.

It only works for so long. Then the desperation sets in.

He doesn’t think either of them is surprised when he kisses Dantalion. Or when Dantalion responds by sighing and shoving him away like he’s done so many times before.

The rejection stings, and he savors the pain anyway.

* * *

The flowers don’t wilt.

They _burn_.

* * *

“I’m going to find that wolf”, Dantalion says.

This time, he goes, through a red door that leads into a stone beach.

Gilgamesh follows.

* * *

They reach the edge of this world the day the veil is broken.

There’s a seam where Limbo meets purgatory, an opalescent wall that shimmers softly. It’s not recommended that demons cross into Purgatory through anywhere but the Antechamber, too many stories about souls getting stuck in the liminality, but the paw prints they’d been following continue through the barrier and into the other side. Dantalion puts his palms on the wall and pushes. It wobbles with a low hum and pushes back against him, unyielding. He readies a fireball, but before he’s able to throw it, the world goes dark.

They look up.

A black mass of energy coils around the twin suns of Limbo. There’s a low whistle and a large gash peels away the sky, revealing the floating islands on the far side of Heaven. The earth rumbles like heavy paws connecting with the dirt and they watch as one of the smaller islands plummets into the ocean.

Then another.

And another.

A larger one follows and the sea recedes then floods in all at once, swallowing the entire coast into a mass of inescapable darkness.

They change course to the mountains.

* * *

River Phlegethon is a winding wall of fire in the vast desert. They follow it for days, almost a beacon guiding them in the darkness. The silence stretches between them once again, but this time it feels pressed and out of necessity. The creatures lurking in the darkness, they only hear.

Eventually, they reach the spot of Astaroth’s resting place: a large pyramid a few miles from the town at the foot of Mt. Peor, guarded by tall statues of her old gods. There’s a trail of blood leading from its entrance to the river, as if a body had been dragged across the sand.

They find Astaroth sitting by the riverbank, muttering to herself, and approach carefully. She turns around, clutching a bone dagger in one hand and pressing something tight to her chest with the other. There are scars on her face, discolored white where the skin seems to have melted off. The worst of it is hastily covered by her hair, now tangled and matted with coagulated blood. She looks tired and afraid, with none of the royalty they came to expect from her. But dangerous still, like she could take the both of them in a fight and win. Dantalion walks closer, slowly, giving her a moment to sense that it’s actually him.

At once, her expression softens. She throws the dagger to the ground and stands up, running to meet him halfway and envelop him into a hug. Gilgamesh looks away, at the statues and the blood on the grass and, finally, at what Astaroth is carrying: a baby, wings pressed tightly to its body, featherless. Not as if it's too young to have grown them, but as if they’d been burned off.

He gives Astaroth a good look as she holds Dantalion. Her clothes are charred and bloodied, the skin on her arms burnt badly. As if she’d jumped into the flaming river.

He figures she did.

She guides them inside, one of her hands on Dantalion’s arm, and without much insistence allows Dantalion to help her with a bath. She takes the angel with her, eyeing Gilgamesh with suspicion, and he wants to say he wouldn’t harm an innocent child, but he honestly doesn’t know if that’s true.

Even so, once she is no longer bloodied, she allows him to tend to her injuries. And insists, rather feverishly, that she can do it herself. Gilgamesh lets her complain all she wants as he coats her skin in a sweet-smelling healing salve. It isn’t long before she passes out from exhaustion, her head lolling backwards against his chest but her arms still tight around the now fully-recovered angel.

He keeps her upright as the healing takes effect, then lays her gently on her bed. It isn’t enough to heal her completely, but it helps, at least, to make Dantalion look less like the world is ending.

He could laugh.

Dantalion approaches slowly, fire reflected in his eyes. Gilgamesh can see the misplaced guilt written all over his face, can almost hear the ways Dantalion tries to rationalize how this could be his fault, as if the mere existence of fire is something he should be blamed for. As if the fast approaching darkness is his fault too, for one reason or another.

“Don’t look if it bothers you so much.”

Dantalion says nothing, only sits down on the ground next to the bed, his forehead pressed to the side of the mattress, and sleeps.

* * *

Astaroth has left by the time they wake up.

The path they came from is halfway overtaken by shadow.

They keep following the river.

* * *

At the summit of Peor, a campfire flickers.

They set camp at the clearing on the peak of the mountain and watched the winding fires of Phlegethon become smaller and smaller, slowly devoured by the mass of darkness below. It’s two thirds of the way up now, and gaining speed. The opalescent barrier around Limbo is still impenetrable.

The red door looms over them, taunting them from just off the edge of the cliff. It’s wide open. A blizzard rages on the other side, making it impossible to distinguish anything but the faint silhouette of a treeline. The sun glare is almost blinding.

On the opposite side of the clearing is an ornate golden door, locked.

They stand in the middle. Gilgamesh stares at Dantalion. Dantalion stares at his wrists. The markings are no longer black with Lucifer gone, but the pinkish burn scars in their place have yet to fade.

“I wonder if I did the right thing.”

Gilgamesh follows his look. “You did what you had to do.”

The last of river Phlegethon becomes encased in shadow, a sharp wind puts out the campfire.

A wolf howls, and they turn to look. Red eyes watch Dantalion from the doorway, the wolf’s black fur speckled white with snow. It snarls and runs into the woods.

Dantalion runs after it. The door melts away into the darkness before Gilgamesh can follow.

A faint glow as the other door unlocks with a click, revealing a dark cobblestone road. The building in the distance is annoying in its familiarity.

Gilgamesh laughs.

“Okay, then, William Twining." He walks up to it, the darkness following closely. "Let’s see what the universe thinks you need me for.”

He crosses the liminality.

**Author's Note:**

> This is just one massive pacing issue pretending to be a fic. I am so sorry.


End file.
